With the beta releases of the next-generation Internet Explorer (IE), IE 8.0, and Googleâ€™s new Chrome browser, the web-browser-tech geek universe is having a field day comparing and contrasting these new offerings.Â The biggest plus both offer is that even if one browser tab crashes, IE 8.0 and Chrome can prevent the entire browser session from crashing. Chrome lets you know the tab is bad; IE 8.0 will automatically restart the failed browser window.

Iâ€™ve been using them both since the Chrome beta became available this week. Chrome is often faster to load a web page, though it's not a huge speed difference, and IE 8.0 doesnâ€™t have the page rendering problems Iâ€™ve noticed in Chrome, where the Chrome font choices and page layout are just slightly â€śoffâ€ť from what the page designer intended.Â But as both browsers are still in beta, Iâ€™m sure things will change before the final release of each application.

Both browsers are being positioned as the core system application that will enable the next generation of web apps that, according to some, will knock Microsoft from the top of the hill (as a business application provider) and bring wonderful benefits to users who make the move to web-based applications and web-hosted services. In Vista Update, and other venues, Iâ€™ve written about the benefits that can be had for small businesses by using web-hosted service providers for technologies such as email and backup, (see "Hosted Applications? Know Your Provider!" at http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/97002/hosted-applications-know-your-provider.html and "Hosted Applications" at http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/94860/hosted-applications.html) so I guess Iâ€™m one of the promoters of that possible future.

However, a major monkey wrench is about to muck up the works for web-based application delivery, and for a change, itâ€™s only remotely a technology issue. The problem is this: Your ISP is likely to soon start putting a cap on your Internet bandwidth usage and add some serious charges or penalties if you exceed those caps.

This issue started to get more coverage in the last few weeks when one of the largest ISPs in the US, Comcast, decided it would cap its users at 250GB per month. Now this is a pretty generous cap, and there are few individuals who would likely exceed it, but if youâ€™re running a small business or SOHO operation, it can become a serious limit, especially because there's no way to actually track your usage and Comcastâ€™s original plan had a severe penalty: no Internet access for 30 days after you exceeded the cap.

But the 250GB cap that Comcast introduced is far better than the caps that other ISPs have introduced. For example, I first became aware of this issue about a month ago when the ISP for my second home, which is in a rural area, changed its terms of service (TOS) to limit the total Internet usage for a single account to 5GB a month of total traffic.Â Customers screamed bloody murder, and the ISP, Frontier Online, quickly backed down on enforcing their TOS but hedged their bet by letting users know that they would have new software in place by 2009 to monitor usage and would be revisiting their pricing structure. Other, larger ISPs, such as Time Warner, are already beta testing capped usage plans, offering lower prices with 5GB caps, and a 40GB â€śpremiumâ€ť service with faster speeds and a higher price.

To give you some idea of the impact that bandwidth caps will have on you, letâ€™s look at my personal use.Â My primary desktop computer averages about 15GB per week of Internet traffic, more upload than download, as I trickle data to an online backup service.Â Thatâ€™s an average however; on some days Iâ€™ll exceed the weekly average if I need to pull OSs, applications, and virtual hard disks (VHDs) down from vendor sites in order to do my job.Â And that 15GB weekly average is only for one of the five Internet-connected computers in my home.Â My kids play online games, everybody in the house gets lots of email, and everyone spends a fair amount of time moving data on the net, in some fashion. I would guesstimate that my household bandwidth usage averages close to 200GB a month. I work at home and would be willing to pay a small premium to guarantee service delivery, but that isnâ€™t in the cards yet, either.

Chances are that more ISPs will start capping Internet usage. Keep that possibility in mind as you begin to look at applications and services that will require you to have Internet access available to keep you in business.

Discuss this Article 6

Gary (not verified)

on Sep 4, 2008

I'd second that comment. As an ex-pat I was shocked moving to New Zealan and having to worry about the cap. Luckily I got an unlimited plan that was only available for a short time. Soon after getting it I got a call from Telecom warning me that I was being watched and would be throttled if I exceeded 700MB between 4PM and midnight. Welcome to the real world.

1. We can be lucky that not everyone on earth has such a bandwidth usage as the author...
2. He should seriously consider a local storage for his backups.
This interesting article put some light on what the future of internet could be. Imagine a virus that silently consumes your bandwidth until the cap is reached... Then imagine your feeling the next 30 days without Internet...

Thanks for the tip about ISP caps, I have not seen this as of yet.
I am commenting on the requirements for IE8. I happened to check the system reqs for running IE8 and was shocked at what I found. XP and 2003 only need 64 MB of memory to run IE8, but Vista and 2008 need 512 MB of memory. Granted my systems that I run have this much memory, but the increase is substantial and suspect. 8 times as much memory! I am running both XP and Vista, and know that Vista has added a lot of "feel nice fluff" to the OS, but am struck wondering how much more "fluff" they have added to the Vista version of IE8 to warrant this much more memory over XP's version? Any ideas why for this increase? With XP 1 GB of RAM was plenty for typical users (I'm not talking about the tech people who actually read these articles as we use more). With Vista 2 GB of RAM seems to be adequate, but with this increase coming from one of the main applications my recommendation will need to increase as well. Is this just memory bloat or what else are we getting with the Vista version?

You Yanks don't know how well off you are if you have never been charged for your usage before. Us Ausies have always been charged for usage from day 1, the plan that I use at the moment gives me 25gb per month for AU$100, with a surcharge of AU$1.50 per mb over that limit. Oh how I would love to be on an unmetered plan.

Well, I've been online long enough to remember payign hourly charges for 300 baud modem access, so the conceopt isn't new to me. And i've been a satellite internet access subscriber and had my account fapped.
But the model that has been in use in the US for the most part has been pay for unimited usage via your high pspeed access provider, which certainly made the potential of web-based applications more appealing. Bandwdth caps are likely to wreak havoc on that emerging market.

Well, I am the author and I know plenty of people who use significantly more Internet bandwidth on an average daily basis than I do. Install an app such as netmeter and you will be very surprised how much bandwidth you can use doing nothing more than surfing then web, especially given the way that many sites try to provide a rich media experience to visitors.

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